


Nine While Nine

by propergoffic



Series: Some Girls Wander By Mistake [1]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir, The Sisters of Mercy (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/F, Interviews, Why Did I Write This?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26821426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic
Summary: In the late summer of 1981, Harrow Nova had just dropped out of Leeds University and Gideon Nav’s visa was about to expire and they both owed several months’ back rent. Unemployed and desperate, they did what everyone unemployed and desperate in the North of England was doing, and started a band.1980s post-punk absolutely-not-goth band AU, in which Harrow occupies an Andrew Eldritch shaped space, told through a series of interviews, by an author MUCH too familiar with Sisters of Mercy trivia.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: Some Girls Wander By Mistake [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001046
Comments: 19
Kudos: 51





	1. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (of the boring kind)

**Author's Note:**

> This is easily the most self-indulgent shite I have ever written. I wish I could explain why. I just - I really am a bit mental about The Sisters Of Mercy, and something about tiny obsessive self-destructive over-achieving nerdy Harrow and - I'm sorry, I just read the character notes for Andrew, my mistake. I think that's why I did this. No other explanation presents itself.

**What are your real names?**

It is considered advisable to adopt a sobriquet under which you can take money in exchange for musical performances while also taking money for being unemployed (under your non-sobriquet title). It remains advisable to retain the sobriquet when faced with people who ask boring questions.

**How did you get started?**

In the late summer of 1981, Harrow Nova had just dropped out of Leeds University and Gideon Nav’s visa was about to expire and they both owed several months’ back rent. Unemployed and desperate, they did what everyone unemployed and desperate in the North of England was doing, and started a band.

**Where did you get the band’s name from?**

In Leeds, and other civilised portions of the world, ‘nine while nine’ is a way of saying ‘from nine in the morning until nine at night’, or vice versa. Vice versa being more likely, if you’re us.

**You are clearly not from Leeds.**

That is clearly not a question. But you (and the other two hundred people who have brought this up) are very observant. Harrow Nova is from Oxford, which is in the South. Gideon Nav is from New Zealand, which is in the Very Extreme South. Ortus Nigenad is actually from Leeds, but don’t tell him: he thinks he’s normal.

**Who on Earth is Ortus Nigenad?**

Ortus Nigenad joined Nine While Nine in 1982, because Gideon Nav was and is the worst guitar player in West Yorkshire, and Harrow Nova cannot play the guitar and sing and stand up at the same time. Ortus Nigenad is very good at playing the guitar (while standing up, even), and also very good at pacing songs so the singer has an opportunity to breathe. Because of this, we overlook that his sobriquet sounds suspiciously like a Dungeons and Dragons demon. Every band needs a competent nerd and he is ours.

**Why can’t I buy the first single anywhere?**

Because it’s dreadful.

**Why is the first single dreadful?**

The songs are not paced so the singer has an opportunity to breathe. The guitarist is doing her best with four and a half usable strings, a three-watt practice amp and a fuzzbox through which she is attempting to play a bass line. The production involves a four-track cassette recorder, and neither the singer or the guitarist can reliably rewind a cassette and play the same song under different conditions in a manner that synchs up. The drum machine is entirely serviceable, but was programmed by a couple of nincompoops who did not, at the time, know their tom-tom from their hi-hat (and still don’t).

**That sounds dreadful. Do you have any musical training at all?**

Harrow Nova trained as a chorister, thank you very much, but was raised to regard music involving guitars as extremely sinful. Ortus Nigenad went to the Royal Northern College of Music, where he learned to do a variety of extremely sinful things involving guitars. Gideon Nav claims ‘natural talent’.

**What is your problem with On The Eighth Day?**

Ortus Nigenad doesn’t like them because they’re Mancs. Harrow Nova doesn’t like them because they’re aggressively Protestant. Gideon Nav doesn’t like them because they’re wankers.

**Why don’t you play more gigs outside Leeds?**

We’d love to, but we need to be booked to do so. Promoters are not keen on booking bands from north of the M4. If you are a promoter, prove us wrong.

**Why don’t you play more gigs in Leeds?**

We could fill any pub toilet in Leeds any night of the week, but that would make us the sort of band who routinely play in pub toilets. We’re not keen.

**Why don’t you release an album?**

We are holding out for the appropriate offer: one which allows us to retain use of the Ninth House label, and full creative control over the album’s contents, trappings, release schedule etcetera. We sincerely hope it will be worthy of the wait.

 **ADDITIONAL MEMO FROM THE NINTH HOUSE:** since these questions were last put to us, the appropriate offer has been presented. DOMINICUS will be released and distributed by Canaan House Records in November 1984. The rock has been rolled away.


	2. From: Melody Maker, January 1987

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your correspondent does a terrible impression of Steve Sutherland. (Ask your dad.) (If you're British. If you're not, I'm afraid you'll have to guess.)

_Nine While Nine’s ascent has been far from meteoric. From the back streets of Leeds to the mean dives of London to ‘big in Germany’ and their first gigs in the United States, the post-proto-punk call-us-goths-and-we’ll-slice-you-up trio-recently-turned-duo have had a fair old time of it. As the dust settled on their final gigs of 1985, guitarist and co-writer Ortus Nigenad parted company with founders Harrow Nova and Gideon Nav (reminder in the face of silly names: do not call them goths, they will slice you up)._

_The split, at first, was amicable, until Nigenad’s new band Matthias Nonius appeared on the scene, playing material co-written with Nova, on the first leg of a tour that lasted all of two weeks. Ninth House transmissions were silent on the matter and, barring a single EP from Nav-fronted side project Speed Queens, the band and label appeared dead on arrival. Rumours were rife: legal action, behind-the-scenes settlement, Nova in rehab or hiding or tax exile._

_Then: Christmas. A black celebration. A Ninth House press release. Terse, evocative, and enigmatic as ever, Nova promised us a follow-up album, to be titled NONAGESIMUS, or The Gift That Keeps On Giving, and the first interview in eighteen months._

_Naturally, we took up the invitation. Your correspondent joins Nova and Nav on a foggy day in Camden Town, and for a moment, it feels like old times again. Nav is on form — bomber jacket, ripped jeans, invariable aviators, and in charge of the umbrella until we step inside their ‘extremely temporary’ digs just north of the Lock. Nova is sleeker and more austere than ever in a velvet three-piece, trademark piercings studded and restrained, slinking back and forth like a housecat not sure what to do around guests. Your correspondent, of course, is confused._

**MM** : So — the old musical differences strike again. Was that really all there was to it?

 **Gideon:** Pretty much. No hard feelings here.

 **Harrow:** Some hard feelings, to be frank. We went through a period of conflict, and we survived, but the way in which we survived makes it rather expensive to discuss how we did it. I wish I could be as blase as Gideon, but it was vexing that for about a year Ortus had no way of getting press without putting words in my mouth, and no way of getting concert dates without putting my words in his.

 **MM:** This is interesting, ‘cause — there’s that chain of singles, and then the album, and he’s credited as co-writer on all of them.

 **Harrow:** Ortus worked on the tunes, and on making the songs work on stage. I never sang a lyric of his. I never found one I could sing. I used to fight with him all the time to get them to make sense —

 **Gideon:** I remember once, I was round the old house in Leeds — this was before I moved in full time — and he had that copy of — was it the _Iliad_? And he was just underlining bits of it in red.

 **Harrow:** Exactly. He would just string aphorisms together. I went to the second Matthias Nonius show, to be polite really, and it was heroic nonsense. But all antipathy aside — and there is antipathy for days, believe me — I still think Ortus is a good composer, and a _very_ good guitar player. We wouldn’t have worked as a live act without him.

 **Gideon:** That wouldn’t be so bad. You’d still have a functioning brain.

 **MM:** Yeah. About that. I’ve been avoiding asking, but — 

_(A note to new readers. The context, which our correspondent was too polite to mention in the room, is that Harrow Nova was hospitalised for a fortnight in late 1985. A Ninth House press release claimed a brain haemorrhage, brought on by overwork. With a top 20 album, first US tour and plans for a second album already underway, it was easy to believe. Then, of course, came the Speed Queens, whose self-titled EP described in rather more blunt terms what life in the corridors of NWN Towers must have been like during the previous year. ‘Sleep When We’re Dead’ indeed…)_

**Harrow:** It’s embarrassing. I think I went temporarily insane.

 **Gideon:** It was like — you insisted on doing almost everything yourself, there was a point where I’d play my bit and Ortus would play his and then we’d go out, come back to the studio sometime after midnight, and you’d still be fucking about with every single effect one by one, just figuring things out. That was fine when it was the three of us in your cellar with kit we bought at Woolworths, but in a whole-ass studio setting…

 **Harrow:** I learned a great deal. Including, I admit, that I have to stop sometimes.

 **Gideon:** And that you’re a shit bassist. A shit bassist with twenty-five years of repression coming out all at once. Things got out of control.

 **Harrow:** It was definitely cathartic, but — marginally better if I don’t do that again.

 **MM:** And yet here we are, talking about a new Nine While Nine album. You must be at least a bit concerned.

 **Gideon:** That’s why I’m still here.

 **Harrow:** The nature of this new project is such that I could do it alone, but — 

**Gideon:** She needs someone who knows her limits better than she does. Album, videos, interviews, yes. Maybe a couple of festivals this summer. No production work at all, bar oversight. No touring. None of that rockstar lifestyle shit, ‘cause she can’t handle it and I can’t handle her when she’s trying to.

 **MM:** We should talk about the album.

 **Harrow:** We should. I am — quite pleased with it.

 **MM:** For one thing: produced by Magnus Quinn.

 **Harrow:** He’s her fault. Gideon absolutely forbade me from producing, and since we are something of a skeleton crew right now, I wanted someone with soul. Someone who could make this record sound bigger than the last one, even in reduced circumstances.

 **MM:** Even so, Quinn — he does soundtracks. Biblical epics, biopics, pomp and circumstance. It’s a bit of a leap…

 **Gideon:** That’s why we wanted him! He’s earnest — he takes everything on trust, very seriously, no irony at all. He’s worked at the kind of scale we wanted for this album, that absolutely massive sound. He just had to figure out how to do it on a mere five figures, which is an ass because he’s the kind of guy who’ll send back a ten grand bottle of champagne because it ‘tastes a bit five-grandy’. You can go to Magnus and say you want a track that hits like Lucretia Borgia’s alarm clock on her eighteenth birthday and Magnus will get it, and he’ll bring that attitude to everything. That’s how you get ‘Resurrection Day’ as an opener. It’s glorious. It’s over-the-top but it’s under control at the same time.

 **MM:** It doesn’t all sound like a soundtrack, though. The first side does, but then you get to a track like ‘Bodies’, which is just raw.

 **Harrow:** ‘Bodies’ was difficult. There are something like seventeen takes of me trying to get through that song and I cannot, for the life of me, do it in one go without crying. It’s on the sleeve as ‘a fragment’ because there is no definitive version. Just something stitched up and scarred, which is — at least thematically appropriate.

 **Gideon:** It’s a shame. That’s the most honest you’ve ever been on record, and it’s gorgeous. We could never play it live though. We’d both be in bits.

_There’s something of a moment between them — Nav’s eyes are unreadable, she hasn’t taken her shades off even indoors, and Nova’s face gives nothing away, but the air practically crackles between them. The intimacy between the founding members of NWN always made Nigenad seem like a third wheel, even on stage at the peak of their powers. Now, with nothing and no-one between them, they seem to retreat into each other. They’ve always said a lot without saying it — those barren and abrupt press releases spring to mind — and there’s a language here that doesn’t want to be deciphered._


	3. From: Barfly, June 1991

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never read Barfly, but my beta suggested it was a better fit than Sounds, on account of how all the contributors seemed to thirst for their interviewees. There followed some discussion of music journalists being a thirsty lot, in many ways.

“Do me a favour,” Gideon Nav says to me, her grin threatening to infect me the longer I spend looking at it. “When you’re back here in a year’s time, don’t act surprised and don’t call it ‘a split’. The guys are on contracts. This version of the band was always going to be a short term thing, ‘cause it will totally blow up if we keep it going too long.”

The third incarnation of Nine While Nine is certainly… unexpected. Harrow Nova and Gideon Nav remain the beating heart of the outfit, the haunting chorister’s voice and driving, combative bass of previous outings, but now coupled to the six-string half of their arch-rivals and nemeses On The Eighth Day. The announcement — oblique and to the point as ever — had us all reeling in the aisles, and I’ve still got mine pinned to the wall.

> _SILAS OCTAKISERON has joined Nine While Nine. Silas Octakiseron plays rhythm guitar._  
>  _COLUM ASHT has joined Nine While Nine. Colum Asht plays lead guitar._
> 
> _MITHRAEUM releases December 1990._  
>  _THE ROCK WILL ROLL AGAIN._

Nav chuckles, and — finally — explains.

“After _Nonagesimus_ , which was 90% the Harrow show… That’s not to say I didn’t like going to Death Valley or wherever, posing with a bass for a video shoot and then chilling out, for two years, ‘cause I did — but I was feeling kinda surplus to requirements, and I missed being in a proper band, and Harrow had her act together again. So I went to her and said ‘I want to make a really fucking stupid record, a Dio record, something that rocks.’ And she laughed me out of the room.

“Anyway, we spent that Christmas in Rhodes, guests of the Duchess doncherknow dahling, and Colum was there. Friends of friends kind of thing. The Eighth were gonna take a year off, and he’s like me, he’s a Sabbath guy and a Stooges guy, and he wanted to do something dirtier, hur hur. He had to talk Silas into it, I had to talk Harrow into it, but in the meantime she’d heard their last single and she said OK, I can hear frustration there, let’s take the choke chain off and see how far they run. Which is no way to talk about your guitarists, but that’s Harrow for you. Of course, when those two nerds got involved it turned into a very very different record to what I’d had in mind.

“Silas and Harrow hate each other, but they can get over it for long enough to play a show, you know? And they’re both used to writing everything, so when it’s his words on her tunes or the other way around they both get to relax a bit. They’re pretty similar people, really. Control freaks, religious upbringing, they both speak about five languages, they both like Pink Floyd way more than is healthy, all that shit. ‘Sacrifice’ is about that, about holding your nose and dealing with what’s in front of you. Although recording that was hell — Harrow didn’t get on with the backing singers either, I remember the whole video she wouldn’t look any of them in the eye off camera, especially Beth. They’re all over her when it’s rolling and she’d just _bamf_ out of there the moment it stopped. I’m actually amazed nobody died making this album. We’ll never be able to make another _Mithraeum_ but fuck me, we don’t need to. It’s perfect.”

Harrow Nova enters our time together. She doesn’t apologise for being late, and if I didn’t slightly fancy her (all right, more than slightly) I’d accuse her of lurking in the hall, dropping eaves. She and Nav are very very handsy — she’s practically draped over her long-serving bassist — and I get to work on keeping that crush under control because there’s no way I’m fighting Gideon Nav for anyone’s affections. The woman’s built like a brick shithouse, and her Stonewall-was-a-riot reputation precedes her.

Anyway. Nova. She’s grown her hair out and let it run wild, the bones are back in her ears, and this new look with the bare shoulders and the ragged skirts pooling around her legs after the clean-cut suits-and-boots look of _Nonagesimus_ is, to be frank, hot as hell. Even the trademark skull makeup is stripped down; her eyes are still shadowed and I’m not sure she even has a nose, but there’s actual skin showing through on her cheeks and her lips only have the barest of lines across them.

I need to stop thinking about Harrow Nova’s lips. 

I broach the topic of the first single from _Mithraeum_ — an odd choice of double A-side.

“Well,” says Nova, who has this trick of effortlessly taking over any conversation she’s in, and not just because Nav seems delighted just to have her there, half on her lap and half on the arm of the chaise (because of course they own a chaise), and has temporarily shut down. “As much as Silas drives me to distraction merely by existing, this album is a collaboration, and ‘Godless’ is an incredible song. Absolute joy to sing, about as spiritual as heavy metal can be, and still ironic enough to be interesting. I can almost overlook that it’s transparently about me.”

I say that’s fine, spiritual, moving, dignified, very much a heavier take on the lofty aspirations of the previous album, but then there’s ‘We Do Bones’, and Nav roars with laughter.

“Yeah, baby!”

“I love you,” says Nova (be still, my broken bleeding heart), “but there’s no way in hell that was going on the album.”

“Totally fair. I just wanted to do one song the way I’d imagined it. Pure cock rock, pure filth. We had two guitarists and I wanted to make sure we used them appropriately. I’m honestly surprised you let me put it out at all.”

“She exaggerates,” says Nova to me, fixing those deep dark eyes on mine (keep going, telltale, do you mean to kill us both?). “All the B-sides this year are Griddle songs and I hate them all. I can’t actually keep a straight face on _this_ one, which is why I’m only on the chorus and why it gets to be a double release. It’s so unlike anything else we’ve done.”

“You did better than Silas, anyway. Especially on TOTP — that’s out there, on record, him playing on a song full of necrophilia jokes.”

“That single’s paid his wages for six months, and it was payback for making me sing about being ‘an unlovely creature, a garden of blasphemies’ and all the rest of it. He’s one of us for now, but — we can afford to be ungracious in our victories.”

And god help me, Harrow Nova smiles. A real smile. She is, apparently, on top of the world. Her girlfriend would kill me if I tried anything, she'd probably eat me alive, but it might be worth it if I got to see that smile again.


	4. That Virgin.Net Interview (1997)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta: "THIS IS GETTING UNCOMFORTABLY CLOSE TO CANON. YOU KNOW I'M ONLY HERE FOR HAPPY AUS."

_The Harrow I spoke to earlier in the year was cosmically indifferent, withdrawn to some remote planet where her grief couldn’t reach her, and — after her well-documented excesses of the previous decade and fortunate survival — clearly furious that Nav had gone first._

_This new Harrow — Harrowhark, as she credits herself on the latest and probably final Nine While Nine release — is cool and politely caustic, bitter and brutally honest. Nothing is sacred. Not the industry, not the press, and certainly not herself. That’s why she can afford to snap back so swiftly at the suggestion — from some quarters who should know better — that she’s cashing in on a tragedy._

HH: Before this record, the band was broke. I have yet to establish how two people can tour for three years, headline Reading, and end up worse off than we were at the start. White wine and pornography aren’t that expensive, as riders go. But such was the case, and that made it necessary to become a cottage industry and gamble on the next one. Which would have been me, Griddle and a home studio no matter what, and ended up being a lot less.

_Which is a strange way to talk about an unheard of amount of material — **Erebos** is Nine While Nine’s first double album, first live album, first compilation, all in one go — but we both know that she’s not talking about the content, but the process. I find the words, somehow, to ask if it’s less, why is there so much of it?_

HH: People — which is to say things that work for record companies and wear suits — listened to the master mix and had a series of goes at me. I think I was on the phone for a week hearing “there aren’t even any real words on this!” What were they expecting? What on Earth was I supposed to say? I could always articulate things in songs before, but this was too much. ‘The River’ and ‘The Tomb’, they’re complete utterances, they don’t need words to be understood, and I’m not sure I could understand them myself if I tried to speak them. 'Wake' is just a statement of intent. ‘One Flesh, One End’ is the only “proper song” and even that has all of six lines. But I couldn’t put anything out at all without breaking contract, and we’d signed for five albums, so I decided to make this a double and do everything we’d never done before — since it was going to be the last one.

_“Everything we’d never done before” includes a remastering and, in one case, rerecording of the earliest Nine While Nine singles — the material which Harrowhark dismissed as “garage rock for people who can’t afford a garage” long ago._

HH: Side three was necessary. Firming up the foundations, setting the stone. It wouldn’t do to skip the beginning. We were thugs, musically speaking, and we did everything the wrong way around. The new versions are more clear, more in keeping with where we ended up. It’s just me, and a couple of big computers, and Ianthe doing the guitar parts because I still can’t play and sing at the same time. All the engineering is her, too — if I’d done it myself I’d still be fussing over it now.

_That’s Ianthe Ida, one part of defunct opera-goth act Tridentaria, who in a past life appeared as a backing singer on the single version of ‘Sacrifice’ — and with whom Harrowhark is documented as not getting along?_

HH: I didn’t like her when she was a bratty singer trying to keep up with her sister, who was better at it anyway. I like her more as a producer. She’s come a long way, and she’d lost — Babs was on the boat too, so she was in the same kind of place as me, she needed something to lose herself in for a while. I’ve never worked with a guitarist who wasn’t insufferable, but she’s the least worst so far.

_Which is my cue to ask about the fourth and final side to **Erebos** , the long-awaited live tracks featuring the unlikeliest reunion of all: Ortus Nigenad, appearing on stage with Nine While Nine for the first time in twelve years._

HH: I hated the idea of being on stage without Griddle. I’ve always hated it. But she’d have liked to play with Ortus again, and for one night, when it was just the old numbers, and since we had half the synths programmed anyway for the re-takes — I could put up with it. She touched a lot of people besides me, and it helped everyone — Ortus, and Magnus, who organised it all, and the crew, and the fans — it helped everyone grieve, and it closed the book on the band.

_Is that the end, I ask her. A festival of remembrance, and then to dust we return?_

HH: I enjoy making records, but I don’t covet the fuss it takes to pay other people to sit in a room for months and make them with me, or living like a tourist for months more so I can sell the damned things. I don’t really have a working relationship with Canaan House any more — they’ve been aggressively useless since _Mithraeum_ and without Griddle to stop me, I’m afraid I keep telling them so. And — all right, listen to this. This should explain. Back in the autumn, we were at the Well up in Leeds, scheming about doing a few low-key gigs next year, and there were these two teenagers on stage. They looked about fifteen, and they were all done up in shiny uniforms, like toy soldiers. They saw us, and they played a few bars of ‘Saltwater’, and you know, my heart skipped. Here were these two children who hadn’t even been born when we started and they were playing our song like it mattered to them, and all we’d ever wanted was to hear ourselves on the radio. But it was always we. I keep saying ‘without her’, don’t I? And that’s the point. Without her, I am undone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, you made it. If you have any idea why I did this, or why it was remotely justified, please let me know. If you are capable of helping me, or know someone who is, likewise. If you are that one person who was waiting for TSOM slash, I'm sorry, I would also totally do early-Nineties Andrew Eldritch.
> 
> There's an origin story for this AU half written. I may yet take leave of my senses and finish it.
> 
> WellHarkAtHer beta'd this and for some reason still loves me.
> 
> Thank you, and goodbye!


End file.
